Circle time, everyone! Please give a warm welcome and a ripe round of applause to today’s secret reader, a convivial and by and large easy-going man from Redmond, Washington who’s got a shorter attention span than the third-graders encircling him, and who’s about as contemplative as a silken windhound, but who nevertheless loves to tell a good story. And, thar she blows:

“Once upon a time, children, there was an ancient and advanced civilization – perchance an alien one – that came before us, as our ancestors here on earth. That was of course a long, long time ago. Theirs was a race of scientists, inventors, and builders whose discoveries, inventions, and building feats would be unimaginable and all but inconceivable for us today. Their ingenuity was boundless and their ambition endless, and so in their desire to attain more knowledge, fashion greater inventions, and build bigger things, their race had ravaged the earth, depleting its resources in order to fuel their zeal and unrelenting industriousness. Lest you wonder, they were not evil – no, they were not; you might even call them human, for you could say that it was in their nature to discover, to learn, and to strive for ever more. So then the earth lay barren, as the aliens had mined all the ore it had to give, and the time had come for those who came before us to leave this world. An entire civilization had collapsed under the weight of its own advancement, and as their people were boarding the evacuation crafts to set sail for other worlds, their leaders vowed to protect future races from a similar fate. And so they tore down their cities, dismantled their laboratories, and disassembled their machines, and cast away all remnants of their scientific knowledge and technological might deep into the mine shafts, the holes they had drilled into the heart of the earth. The aliens also left behind a small group of sentries, including some of their finest computer scientists, who selflessly remained on this planet so they could guard the knowledge and technology that was kept hidden inside those mines, silently waiting to be unearthed again maybe in a distant future. When the alien ships had departed, the earth was in great pain and started to cry, and so it rained for thousands of years, flooding the plains with raging rivers and covering the abandoned mines under yawning oceans, and at last the earth healed itself, recovering unwearyingly until today. Yet the sentries too would wait patiently – over eons of generations, if necessary – for any future civilization to form, grow, and evolve. And they would carefully watch the progress of these new specimen, and only when they were deemed ready and responsible in their use of it, would they be given access to that knowledge and technology. For that was the stated mission of those who stayed behind, to prevent future people from following their very own path of curiosity, discovery, and the ensuing endless cycle of invention and creation of things that would require more and more resources to consume, and that would lead, yet again, to the destruction of the planet. Yes, they would bestow upon those yet to be spawned by an arbitrary chemical flash of the universe, the wisdom and the tools necessary to advance to civilization. But in an orderly and sensible fashion, without rushing nature or committing rash judgment, like you would never dream of giving a matchbook to a child or letting Ricky Gervais host the Golden Globes ever again. And yes, these sentinels are still amongst us … but you cannot see them, for they are hidden in plain sight, whilst they sit on every (heck, almost every) desktop and live in practically every home … they’ve been protecting you like only a parent would, and they remain your guardians forever more … they call themselves … … … Microsoft.”

Mr. Ballmer … sorry, sir, I believe we just lost the children (more like: Steve, man, you had to fly a whole B-2 bomber squadron over these poor kids’ heads!). Only Reggie has the good form to excuse himself to visit his urologist, but all the others in Ms. Maidstone’s gaggle are now toiling catatonically between Medieval boredom for a complete lack of comprehension and a state of bare and phalanxed fear, because there’s a grown man pounding his white-knuckled fists on a lectern that isn’t there, while yelling something about “Your Potential. Our Passion.” Even the part-absentee Reggie would later conclude that today’s classroom visitor – though hardly prepossessing vis-à-vis his physical attributes – had this maniacal energy about him – curiously, even when talking about mundane things like windows – that would make Shaka Zulu look like yet a well-adjusted individual.

Steve Ballmer really did try hard to regale the children. His story had a number of admirable if not charming qualities and was undoubtedly as multi-layered as a Windows 7 upgrade. How coincidental that the master of blood-, sweat-, and tears-soaked chants and the powerful CEO of Microsoft would escort such themes close to your blogger’s own heart:

Be as advanced as you must, but without ruining the Earth for our children;

Alien technology is cool, but alien archeology is not, for it means you’re a member of the “looking it up on Google” entitlement club that eschews knowledge from first principles;

Science and technology are the wayfarers of our cultural evolution; and finally the motto:

“Number two will never do” … as a certain portal technology has become the victim of its own success with many implementations no longer easily manageable, and a new version of an industry-leading comprehensive collaboration platform now available to delight both administrators and users alike.

SharePoint – of course! – is what your mother used to refer to as the quintessential “portal,” a collection of web-based collaboration elements, process management components, search modules, and document-management functions. With SharePoint you can easily host web sites that access shared workspaces, information stores, and documents, as well as control host-defined applications, such as blogs and wikis. Users of the system can just as easily manipulate so-called “Web Parts” controls to customize the portal or interact with any of the content pieces, such as item lists and document libraries. But just like our allegorical alien race which succumbed to its own success, SharePoint has been so successful in its adoption that many SharePoint implementations have over time grown massive and unwieldy with too much content and too many users and with generally too many options for users to interact with that content. SharePoint customers getting burdened by the management of an implementation that has become too popular and gotten out-of-control, can now look to Microsoft’s brand-new release to reevaluate and reorganize their environments, making them a lot more usable and far easier to search. Le Portal est mort. Vive le Portal!

Microsoft bills its latest version of SharePoint as the “Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web,” and SharePoint 2010, which went RTM on April 17 and is launching globally this week on May 12, represents a huge improvement over its predecessor SharePoint Server 2007. Some of the new feature highlights include:

A new user interface, including the new “Office Ribbon,” providing the proper context for any task for both administrators and users;

A function called “Web Edit,” allowing easy site customization, with SharePoint 2010 now being more like a wiki and with sites being presented as pages rather than lists;

Enterprise Metadata Management (also known as the “SharePoint taxonomy”), enabling a centralized taxonomy;

A new “services model” makes the “Shared Services Provider” of the 2007 release redundant, allowing administrators to decide whether services are run against a central farm or live on a local server; administrators can be delegated for specific applications, and permissions can be set at the application feature level;

Updated data connectivity service for creating, deleting, and managing external-source data, from say Oracle or SAP;

Improved security through a new authentication model – based on standard protocols, including SAML, WS-Federation, WS-Trust, and “managed accounts” – supporting a wide variety of identity managers;

A new “health analyzer” extends the “best practices analyzer” of SharePoint 2007;

Central administration through a browser-based dashboard and flexible PowerShell-scripting options;

Workspace caches changes and synchronizes them when users go offline and reconnect to the SharePoint site;

Upgraded databases are presented with their visual elements from the older platform, including helpful “2010” and “prior” modes, while server administrators can mark databases as read-only during the upgrade, allowing users access while locking databases against changes until the upgrade is complete;

An easy upgrade path for both farm and server administrators who can now upgrade a number of databases in parallel by running multiple PowerShell sessions (including alternate-access mapping in order to direct traffic between a SharePoint 2010 farm and an existing SharePoint farm, using an HTTP “302” redirect for more “gradual” upgrades).

I invite you to contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) should you or your company be thinking about using Microsoft SharePoint, whether it’s to build a new site or to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. Our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) has helped many of our clients successfully implement 2007 as well as already make the most of 2010’s new metadata features: migrating and tagging content, designing efficient, reusable taxonomy structures, and moving (often ultra-heavy!) content between sites and file servers.

At this point, I’m particularly proud to be able to reference one of our largest and oldest SharePoint clients, our valued customer and long-standing, multi-year partner, Agilent. Agilent Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis (http://www.chem.agilent.com/en-US/Pages/Homepage.aspx) is a leading global provider of instrumentation, supplies, software and services to the life science and chemical analysis markets. With revenue of $2.2 billion, the group accounted for approximately 38% of Agilent’s $5.8 billion of total revenue in 2008, and its 5,000 employees serve more than 25,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Agilent engaged Talent Trust to provide SharePoint developers and publishers in a remote staff augmentation model. These remotely stationed contractors are spread across five strategically chosen offshore locations; they work under Agilent’s direct supervision and form a virtual extension of the client’s Colorado-based SharePoint team. The Talent Trust-provisioned personnel is charged with helping develop and maintain Agilent’s Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis global web presence, which is implemented in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; the group is also charged with all related SharePoint publishing activities to update the commerce and catalog sites. Agilent had a dual objective: to create a dedicated SharePoint maintenance and publishing team with offshore leverage for critical cost savings; and to distribute that team across three main time-zones in three different continents and with the associated differential language capabilities to be able to achieve a hyper-productive 24×7 support organization as well as offer region-specific, localized support to its constituents (customers, suppliers, employees). For this multi-continent distributed team to function as a cohesive unit – and, just as importantly, following Agilent’s best-practice prescriptions for external publishing at all times – a common body of standard training, performance management, and process workflow had to be created and implemented, whereas strict and continuous adherence to globally-consistent taxonomies and common practices are deemed key success factors.

There’s fierce shouting coming from behind the boardroom door. “Are you the lion, or are you the Christian?” To which Mr. Singh, obviously a Sikh and the head of all IT for a very large consumer goods retailer in the UK, simply replies: “Neither.” Mr. Singh is losing his patience, mind you not his temper, for it was his idea to stage this team event under the auspices of one self-proclaimed yet highly-regarded (and very highly paid) ‘IT leadership’ guru. After we’ve determined that eating others, as a leadership strategy, is almost always preferable to getting eaten (unless, of course, you’re a radical pacifist or vegetarian, ave, great guru, morituri te salutant), we further learn that the world is a rocky place, and that we can either “wrap our feet in leather, or we can wrap the whole world in leather,” and that it’s entirely our choice to make – a parable I presume that hints at finding practical solutions over tackling huge and intractable problems. There’s no denying the wisdom in that. After we’ve cycled through the recycled learnings of the Greek Atomists, that time for instance is like a river for one cannot touch the same water twice, and that the tortoise paradoxically outruns the hare, we’re then shouting out mantras in chorus, pronouncing our lust for lifelong learning and career advancement; and finally, we’re now jumping into the river of life, feet first and from the boardroom table; and if looks could kill, there’d be one less IT leadership guru in this world.

The repurposed reference to the great Indian warrior deity Lord Rama whom the Bhāgavata Purāṇa describes as fairly even-keeled, that is “unfazed in defeat and unexcited in victory” (but who’d habitually shatter his opponents into a thousand pieces with a mere flick of his left pinky) is thankfully lost on Mr. Singh’s team which prides itself on achieving and celebrating success and does its best to avoid failure and will take it to heart when it happens. I marvel at Singh’s self-restraint not to whip out his pocket scimitar to slice through the guru babble and to end this expensive farce. The farewell quote from Sri Guru Granth Sahib couldn’t come soon enough: “Applying oneself to the service of the Guru, the mind is purified, and peace is obtained.” And the wallet is drained.

Farewell to gurus and other hired guns and the money they cost (apologies, Warren Zevon, your lyrics never forgotten) and welcome you, Trusted Advisor.

I’ve known Mr. Singh for over a decade and have followed his ascent in the world of corporate IT leadership across his employment at three blue-chip firms over the years. In other words, I’ve “followed him around” from company to company, first as a services provider, then as strategic partner, and now as a “Trusted Advisor.” I here offer my own definition of what has clearly become an industry meme: the Trusted Advisor is a highly-informed company-outsider who has earned the trust of an insider by giving impartial advice (at the risk of not always selling one’s wares), being a sounding board as much as an idea coach, and an innovative problem solver who treats the client’s problems as his own. Like talk is cheap, advice, freely given is of course just that, free and is easily bestowed. Advice, however, becomes trusted and valuable when it stems from a history of commitment, excellence, and some form of (vendor) neutrality. The client and the Trusted Advisor will have taken a long journey together (with their shares of triumphs and disappointments along the way); there are no shortcuts to establishing that level of trust, for it takes a long time to build up, and it can easily vanish in an instance at the first sign of stupidity or betrayal. You’ll be entering many a business development cul-de-sac, with the cost of doing business an unknown variable, you don’t count and never show off your battle scars, and you must have or at least exhibit Old Testamental patience. Once you’ve obtained that status, the benefits are immeasurable. I no longer sell anything to Mr. Singh, I don’t have to; rather I am very proud to be getting “called into” some of his numerous IT challenges where, more often than not, our company can offer up a highly competent and trustworthy solution.

In fact, I’m also proud to say that Talent Trust, our company which assists clients meet their staffing needs by provisioning highly skilled IT professionals located offshore, operates by the same principle of being a Trusted Advisor to both our customers and our supply partners. Our clients manage their Talent Trust-sourced IT professionals as if they were their own, geographically dispersed employees. Working with remote third-party resources requires – what of course? – trust. Building that trust – a strong sense of reliability and confidence in predictable performance – takes time. Again, there are no shortcuts and no substitute for “trial and error” and no shunning the ol’ battle scars. That is why Talent Trust was formed ten years ago with the goal of aggregating the best and most trustworthy midmarket IT firms, nearshore and offshore, with a focus on finding entrepreneurial boutiques and niche experts. We have vetted and worked with hundreds of these firms and, over time and with experience, have distilled our supply base to fifty trusted partners and active members of the Talent Trust Alliance. The Alliance has the combined technical capabilities and geographic diversity to meet most client needs for IT skills in all major time zones.

Most Talent Trust Alliance partners are certified by one or more of the major industry players: Cisco, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, and Sun. Furthermore, Alliance members are subject to continuous monitoring, frequent audits, and Talent Trust’s hands-on, in-country quality assurance program. Our IT professionals are the full-time employees of Talent Trust Alliance member firms – never freelancers. As such, they are not dissimilar to the high-end candidates a client would consider for a permanent staff role. Most are degree qualified software engineers and computer programmers with domain specialization and professional certification as well as strong English language- and communication skills. They are screened, recruited, and trained by an Alliance member in their country (e.g., Argentina); and they work as salaried employees at the Alliance member’s professional office (say in Buenos Aires) which is equipped with the necessary infrastructure / bandwidth, hardware, and software to work in a distributed environment. Many of our IT professionals have years of ongoing experience working with U.S.-based clients in a remote capacity. All our IT professionals are fully vetted and individually screened to match a client’s requisition – not just by their Talent Trust Alliance employer but also by our U.S.-based account management team.

For more information I invite you to check out: http://www.talenttrust.com/ We are a U.S. company with headquarters in Silicon Valley and have a ten-year history of being Trusted Advisors to a broad range of clients, from startups, medium-sized businesses, to Fortune 100 enterprises. And lest you wonder, no guru babble spoken here.

There is many a pearl of wisdom to be found in Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s celebrated Shareholder Letter, where in its most recent installment, Warren E. Buffett, the great value investor, Sage of Omaha, and all-around good (and very rich) guy issues the following warning: “Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut.” Something about wandering into Lloyd Blankfein’s office and wondering if you should be doing more M&A deals. Tougher Wall Street regulations? For the birds! Having Goldman Sachs traders worry about global risk management – like having Saddam Hussein watch over your nuclear weapons stockpile or the brothers at Delta Tau Chi curate your wine cellar. The point: don’t ask me whether you need a remote IT workforce …

Instead, ask any economist what would happen if a given commodity – such as oil or lithium, hey you, I’m-sitting-on-a-thousand-laptop-batteries Tesla-driver – became scarce, and you might just receive a textbook, two-part answer: firstly, make more efficient use of what you have (indeed the hybrid car comes to mind); and secondly, explore alternate sources towards the same end (think windmills and solar panels). And if consumption cannot be limited regardless, the price of that commodity will, of course, continue to rise.

Whether you’re filling up at the gas station, amping your Prius, or filling positions for IT professionals as your company’s hiring manager, you’ll encounter much of the same problem: IT talent – as a local market commodity – has become preciously scarce and hence expensive and difficult to procure. And just like discussions around our Nation’s dependency on (mostly foreign) oil and other precious goods, it is impossible today not to consider the local-global context behind the demand for and supply of IT talent. Given the post-recession blues that surround us, it may come as a counter-intuitive shocker that government estimates put the shortfall in talent still this year at 10 million individuals – which it measures as the number of domestic workers required in order to just keep up with the nation’s productivity levels. (On that very point, however, on how we did manage through a jobless recovery, increasing productivity with fewer workers, I’ve just witnessed a most Dilbert-esque exchange in our Silicon Valley office, with folks now associating being no longer stuck in traffic for hours on their morning commute along the nightmarish Highway 101 as “great for me but unhealthy for the economy.”)

Driven by such irreversible demographic macro-trends as declining birth rates and the coming vacuum left by the soon-to-retire Baby Boomer generation paired with steadily dropping enrollment rates for science graduates, the impending “Talent Shortage” will become one of our great economic challenges for decades to come (making assorted trading-floor shenanigans of recent memory look paltry). Already – and especially in the field of IT – it is taking hiring managers longer to find fewer qualified candidates at higher salary levels (even in a job market where anybody fit to as much as just fog a mirror is applying for Java developer roles). (And it is perhaps a troubling matter of fact that the U.S. produces more board-certified sports therapists than computer scientists; and in Germany, another fast-aging country, there are now more landscape architects than electrical engineers.)

The Talent Shortage – I predict – will bring out the textbook economist in all the rest of us: either we make our existing people more efficient, and/or we find alternate (non-domestic, speak global) sources of talent. (The former, an exercise in what is known as “talent management,” is about creating just the right match between work and worker as well as striking an optimal balance between full- / part-time workers and internal / external positions.) The latter, often referred to as “remote staff augmentation,” works on the principle that there is an asymmetric distribution between work and workers in high- and low-cost countries, respectively (for example: the U.S. or Germany vs. Brazil, Bulgaria, or India); and that it is more practical (in most cases and for all parties concerned) to move the work, and not the worker (see my previous blog).

There are some fundamental changes in the world of work that are re-shaping the nature of both the workplace and the workforce; changes brought about by technology and globalization that are calling into question the traditional proximity between the work and the worker. Most IT professionals today have experience with distributed development teams – either as part of a geographically dispersed organization across multiple office locations or during the course of working with an offshore services provider. The notion that IT (and other forms of knowledge-) work can be done remotely, in a virtual fashion, now seems hardly revolutionary.

Just a quick statistical account of ‘Remote Working / Teleworking’ here in the States and in Europe will help make the point:

“It is estimated that 100 million U.S. workers will telecommute by 2010.” (Kiplinger)

“In a survey of 178 U.S. businesses with between 20 and 99 employees, the Yankee Group found that 79% had mobile workers, with an average of 11 mobile workers per company and 54% had telecommuters, with an average of eight telecommuters per company.” (Yankee Group)

“15% of the EU workforce can be described as ‘mobile workers’ (spending more than 10 working hours per week away from home and their main place of work) and 4% as mobile teleworkers.” (Statistical Indicators Benchmarking the Information Society)

Through remote staff augmentation, employers can remotely deploy individuals (and teams of individuals) across geographic distances and time zones, managing them and collaborating with them (almost) just as effectively as if they were all in one physical location. This is typically accomplished through enabling processes and technologies – giving rise to something akin to a “Virtual Workplace,” a collaborative and often web-based environment for performing distributed work. By electronically moving the work, rather than physically placing the worker, employers can effectively augment their local staff with global talent that is situated off-site for tasks that can be performed remotely. And given the sheer population size and ample talent pools in many low-cost countries (my current “there-is-IT-services-export-beyond-India” favorites include: Philippines, Argentina, Ukraine, Egypt, Vietnam – but let us revisit again China next year), seemingly poised to do just the opposite from our high-cost countries in terms of high fertility rates and the wholesale graduation of IT workers, the long-term fundamentals behind global talent sourcing appear to be solid.

To be an effective strategy to address the Talent Shortage remote staff augmentation must be implemented (and its effectiveness continuously measured) along the following three success factors:

Access – give yourself the flexibility you need to meet all your skills requirements, as the likelihood of finding just one offshore partner that has the breadth, depth, and ready availability of all skills required is low (consider multi-vendor arrangements for reasons of both readiness and redundancy);

Quality – remember the adage “quality is not a function of size;” find suitably sized offshore partners that will commit quality resources, regardless of business volume (there are thousands of high-quality firms in India alone that may be successfully engaged on smaller or mid-sized projects – i.e., for business volumes generally too low for the top-tier Indian vendors);

Cost – follow a diversified country approach and be careful not to over-invest in one particular offshore location which may overheat due to popularity.

If indeed the world is flat (as it has been famously and convincingly argued), or at least, if the world is becoming bigger and smaller at the same time, the dual realities of a global workforce and a virtual workplace are forcing us to simply think differently about workers and their work. Remote staff augmentation is a key part of that new thinking, as the Talent Shortage combined with rising cost pressures and the fact that many of today’s IT jobs can be performed remotely, call for a more global and virtual view of talent acquisition and delivery.

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Christophe Kolb

Christophe is one of the original pioneers of the technology-enabled remote services industry.

He co-founded Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com) in 2000 to help clients meet their staffing needs with flexible access to highly skilled IT professionals located offshore.

Talent Trust, the reliable and flexible offshore partner you’ve come to know and trust over the last decade is now tightly focused on providing innovative and affordable mobile solutions for the enterprise. Headquartered in San Francisco, Talent Trust employs mobile experts at our own development centers in Córdoba, Argentina and Lima, Peru.

What Makes Us Different? Experience the Power of Global Entrepreneurship.
Completely hands on and entrepreneurial to the core, our overseas management teams and senior developers have a direct interest in the success of their operation. This incentive model promotes long term resource continuity and ensures unconditional alignment with our clients’ success. As a result, our employees treat their clients’ projects as their own and infuse each engagement with an entrepreneur’s “must win” spirit – in contrast to the “nine to five” norm.

Backed by a Team of Local Experts.
In addition, a dedicated San Francisco-based engagement management team guarantees our clients’ satisfaction, specifically taking over the extra tasks associated with offshoring that arise from physical separation. An integral part of the Talent Trust offering, this onshore service is designed to take the friction out of working remotely and ranges in scope from: screening, matching, and allocating the resources; to monitoring their work along with productivity metrics, reporting on progress and project milestones, and facilitating communication; all the way to flagging and resolving any problems, timekeeping, and billing.

Are you looking to build valuable and cost-effective IT solutions that will help your company win in business? And are you looking for entrepreneurial resources that will go the extra mile to ensure your success? Then please visit our web site www.talenttrust.com to learn more, or contact me directly at christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com.

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Christophe Kolb

Christophe is one of the original pioneers of the technology-enabled remote services industry.

He co-founded Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com) in 2000 to help clients meet their staffing needs with flexible access to highly skilled IT professionals located offshore.

Talent Trust, the reliable and flexible offshore partner you’ve come to know and trust over the last decade is now tightly focused on providing innovative and affordable mobile solutions for the enterprise. Headquartered in San Francisco, Talent Trust employs mobile experts at our own development centers in Córdoba, Argentina and Lima, Peru.

What Makes Us Different? Experience the Power of Global Entrepreneurship.
Completely hands on and entrepreneurial to the core, our overseas management teams and senior developers have a direct interest in the success of their operation. This incentive model promotes long term resource continuity and ensures unconditional alignment with our clients’ success. As a result, our employees treat their clients’ projects as their own and infuse each engagement with an entrepreneur’s “must win” spirit – in contrast to the “nine to five” norm.

Backed by a Team of Local Experts.
In addition, a dedicated San Francisco-based engagement management team guarantees our clients’ satisfaction, specifically taking over the extra tasks associated with offshoring that arise from physical separation. An integral part of the Talent Trust offering, this onshore service is designed to take the friction out of working remotely and ranges in scope from: screening, matching, and allocating the resources; to monitoring their work along with productivity metrics, reporting on progress and project milestones, and facilitating communication; all the way to flagging and resolving any problems, timekeeping, and billing.

Are you looking to build valuable and cost-effective IT solutions that will help your company win in business? And are you looking for entrepreneurial resources that will go the extra mile to ensure your success? Then please visit our web site www.talenttrust.com to learn more, or contact me directly at christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com.